Life as an Afghan Soap Opera Actress

What's it like to be an actress in Afghanistan's first-ever soap opera? In a country where female stardom is taboo and where both sides of the 30-year-war routinely subjugate, harass, and brutalize women, it's not like starring in an American soap opera. The New York Times Magazine's Elizabeth Rubin interviews the female actresses of "The Secrets of This House." Her story also includes a captivating photo gallery.
Many have been threatened, harassed, or disowned for daring to appear
on television. Rubin writes of one actress, "Was it a métier, a calling?
Not really. It was a job. She has been acting now for three years.
Often she finds herself acting her own life out onstage."

Arzoo, who portrays Soraya, comes from such a conservative Pashtun
family that when she became an actress, she says, her uncle tried to
kill her and the neighbors beat up the taxi drivers who took her home.
Since childhood she had dreamed of being an actress. She refused to give
up. “My family were very close, but once they saw me onscreen, they
disowned me,” she whispered to me in a corridor of the Tolo TV set. “My
father said if you are happy to work in films, you are dead for us. You
are not our daughter.”

Every single woman I met working on “The
Secrets of This House” faces scorn, ostracization and even death
threats. “We are hypocrites,” Mohseni told me. “We all watch TV, but we
don’t want women to appear on TV.” Actually it’s not that they don’t
want women on TV — dancing Indian girls are as popular as ever. It’s
that families don’t want their women to be on TV. Arzoo’s father
told her, “You took all the honor of our family away.” And it is this
honor — the family asset — that is at stake in every women’s issue in
Afghanistan. If the honor is tainted, the family is tainted.

Rubin
also talks to the women for their thoughts on the ongoing peace
process, which includes a possible role in the government for Taliban
leaders who renounce violence.

We were discussing the possibility
of official negotiations with the Taliban. “If the Taliban come back,
they’d behead all of us,” Shekiba said.

Abada, who’d been quiet,
jumped in: “There’s no need for the Taliban to come back. Even now my
brother-in-law tells my husband that he’s not a man anymore because I
appear on television.” And then out flowed Abada’s life story. “I still
think of suicide,” she said, “but then who will take care of the
children? I have to pay the rent, feed them, my daughter has a liver
problem. It’s for these reasons that I act, though I take so much
humiliation for it, even my fellow teachers tell me things. . . . ” She
broke off. She cried. Her daughter fiddled with a string hanging off her
school backpack. Everyone in the room became sad. Then the assistant
director, a woman named Shahla Rachidi, leaned in the door and asked us
to be quiet for the shoot.

Here is a documentary on "The Secrets of This House," which includes revealing snippets of the show: